Kindle County: Reversible Errors Part 2

"It's awkward." She crushed out the cigarette, thinking only now that the smoke might bother him. Inside, no one ever complained about smoke. It remained a privilege.

In her time, Gillian had gone from prosecutor to judge and then to convicted criminal defendant. It was an extreme example, but even her wayward career reflected the nature of the criminal bar, which was much like a repertory theater company in which every attorney was apt to have a turn at each part. The prosecutor against whom you tried a case was on the bench the next time you saw her, and in private practice hustling your clients a decade after that. Rivalries and friends.h.i.+ps were fortified or forgotten in the parade of years, while every achievement or failure endured somewhere in the memory of the community.

Understanding all that, Gillian nonetheless found the fortunes that had brought her together again with sad, driven little Arthur Raven somehow indigestible. Thirteen years ago, after twenty months on the bench, Gillian had received her first a.s.signment in the criminal courts, presiding over misdemeanor cases and probable cause hearings. Arthur Raven was the Deputy Prosecuting Attorney delegated to her courtroom. They were each new to their jobs, and at that point she was certain her prospects were far brighter than Arthur's. It was common in trial practice to find men and women skilled in making themselves appealing, people who had mastered the outward gestures of candor and humility, even when they masked a volcanic core of egocentricity and ambition. With Arthur, what you saw was what you got: relentless intensity and a desire to win that bordered on the desperate. Half the time he was before her, she wanted to tell him just to take a pill. She probably had, since, even by her own reckoning, she'd never been especially kindly or patient as a judge. But who could blame her? Beneath it all, Arthur seemed to cling to the unlikely belief that victory would at last impart the more triumphant character he so clearly yearned for.

As if it was not a ridiculously loaded question, Arthur now asked, "And how have you been?"

"So-so," she answered. The truth was that after several years of coming to grips, she was realizing she had not come to grips at all. There were periods"most of the time now, and always for several years"when the sheer shame of her situation left her mad, mad in the sense that she knew every thought was disrupted by it, like a vehicle bouncing down a cratered road.

"You still look terrific," he offered.

In Gillian's experience, a man's motives for complimenting a woman were always suspect, a stepping-stone to s.e.x or some less grandiose manipulation. She asked abruptly what this was about.

"Well," he said, "let me use your word. It's awkward. I've been appointed by the U.S. Court of Appeals on a case. A second habeas. Rommy Gandolph. Do you recall the name?"

She did, naturally. Only two capital cases had reached sentencing in the years she had sat in Felony. In the other, the death penalty had been imposed by a jury. Rommy Gandolph had been her responsibility alone. Bench trial. Bench sentencing. She'd reconsidered the case again a couple of months ago when she'd received a letter from Rudyard with the typically crazed claims of a prisoner who, ten years after the murders, suddenly said he had critical knowledge to share with her. Probably someone she'd sent to the joint, now hoping to get her down there to spit in her eye. Searching her memory of the Gandolph trial, she could still summon the photos of the bodies in the restaurant food locker. During the trial, one of the cops had explained that the freezer was vast because of the wide menu Paradise offered. A strange undoing.

"Right," said Raven when she described the case. "Good Gus. But you know the game. I have to plow every row. There are even moments when I'm delusional and think he might be innocent. I have this a.s.sociate," he said, "she's been tearing this case apart, coming up with amazing stuff. Here, look at this."

From out of his thick case, Raven handed over the first of several sheets of paper. Apparently, he was trying to work up a theory that Gandolph had been in jail on a probation violation at the time of the murders. Few records remained, and Gandolph's rap sheet offered no corroboration. But within the last few days, Arthur had found a transfer manifest showing that his client had been transported to court on the morning of July 5, 1991, from the House of Corrections.

"And what does Muriel say to that?" Gillian asked. Muriel Wynn, who'd been the junior prosecutor on the case a decade ago, was now the Chief Deputy P.A. and the short-odds favorite to succeed Ned Halsey as the Prosecuting Attorney in next year's election. Gillian had never cared much for Muriel, the kind of hard-boiled woman the felony courthouse produced often these days. But, truth be told, Gillian's appreciation for prosecutors, even though she had once been one, had all but disappeared given her experiences of the last several years.

"She thinks Rommy's probation officer must have gone out and collared him that morning so he didn't blow his court date," Arthur said. "I don't buy it on a Friday, right after a holiday, when n.o.body wanted to be working. Muriel also says it's ridiculous to think that both the client and the defense lawyer missed the fact that Rommy was in jail when the murders went down. But he wasn't arrested until four months after the crime, and Rommy doesn't know today from tomorrow."

Gillian's wager would have been that Muriel was correct. But she was unwilling to jump into the argument. With Arthur, she felt recalled to a mode of decorum she thought she'd left behind: she was trying to be judicial. Notwithstanding her efforts to respond neutrally, he appeared to detect her skepticism.

"There was a lot of bad evidence," he said. "I know that. I mean, Rommy confessed about twenty times. And Christ could return to earth to testify in my client's behalf and I'd still lose at this stage. But the guy had no history of a.s.saults or armed robberies. Which Molto and Muriel explained at trial by claiming my guy was dusted, and now all the research on PCP says it doesn't correlate to violence. So, you know, there's stuff."

"And how did the Court of Appeals appoint you, Arthur?"

"Beats me. They always figure big law firms have the resources. Besides, someone up there probably remembered I have death-penalty experience from prosecuting Francesco Fortunato."

"The fellow who poisoned his family?"

"Three generations, grandparents through children, and laughed out loud in court every time we mentioned one of their names. Even so, I nearly pa.s.sed out as the jury read the death sentence. That's when I transferred to Financial Crimes. I'd probably die myself if I had to push the b.u.t.ton in the execution chamber, but I still believe in capital punishment in principle."

Oddly, Gillian didn't"not now or before. Too much trouble, in a few words. A decade ago, after Rommy Gandolph's trial was over, his defense lawyer, Ed Murkowski, admitted to her that he'd taken a bench sentencing because he'd heard a rumor about her views. But she wasn't sitting there as a legislator. If any crime warranted execution, Gandolph's did.

"And what is it that you want to know from me, Arthur? If I have second thoughts?" At this point no one would care about her opinion. And she had no doubts anyway about Gandolph's guilt"she'd settled that again in her own mind months ago when the prisoner's letter had arrived from Rudyard. She could still recall another remark Murkowski, Gandolph's lawyer, had pa.s.sed after sentencing, when all of them, including the prosecutors, had communed in her chambers for a moment now that the awful words had been spoken. Gillian had commented dryly about Gandolph's insanity defense and Ed had responded, 'It was better than the story he had to tell, Judge. That was nothing but a slow guilty plea.'

She had some thought to explain all of that to Arthur, but his black eyes had suddenly dropped to her ashtray, studying the gray remains there as if they were tea leaves. Arthur, she realized, was finally going to get to the point.

"The Court of Appeals is killing me with kindness," he said, "probably because they appointed me. I begged for a chance to do discovery and they sent the matter down to the District Court until June 29th, before they decide whether to permit Gandolph to actually file a new habeas. So I'm turning over every stone." He finally ended his studied efforts not to look at her. "Listen, I have to ask. While you sat in Felony, were you doing what got you in trouble later, when you were hearing personal-injury cases?"

She had not been enjoying this conversation much as it was, but now that she recognized the direction, a familiar freeze overcame her.

"Do people say that?"

"Gillian, please don't play games. Or get insulted. I'm doing what I have to do."

"No, Arthur, I wasn't taking money when I heard criminal matters. No one bribed me on Rommy Gandolph's case"or any other case at that time. It began in Common Pleas, where it seemed to be the order of the day." She shook her head once, both at the lunacy of it and because her remark sounded faintly like an excuse.

"All right," he said, but he was plainly applying a lawyer's judgment to her answer, weighing its verity. Watching him calculate, she decided that Arthur did not look particularly well. He was short, and had never appeared especially fit, but he was aging before his time. His dark eyes had retreated into bruised-looking flesh that suggested overwork and poor diet, and his hair was thinning. Worst, he still had an aspect of hound-dog eagerness, as if his tongue at any second might lop out of the corner of his mouth. She recalled then that he had a situation, family trouble, someone chronically sick. Perhaps it had worn him out.

"And what about the drink, Judge?"

"The drink?"

"Did you have an alcohol problem when you sat on Rommy Gandolph's case?"

"No."

"You weren't drinking?"

He was skeptical"justifiably, she knew.

"What do other people say, Arthur?"

"What other people say won't matter much, if you're going to testify that you weren't drinking hard at the time."

"I drank, Arthur. But not to excess."

"Not at that time?"

She flexed her tongue a bit in her mouth. Governed by common understanding, Raven had missed his mark. She could correct him, or say, 'Never,' and see if Arthur eventually wandered to the right place, but she remembered the instructions every skilled lawyer offered in preparing a witness: Answer the question you are asked. Briefly, if possible. Do not volunteer.

"No, not at that time." She tossed her cigarettes into her suede shoulder bag, and snapped it authoritatively. She was ready to go, and asked if Raven was finished. Instead, he took a second to run a thick finger around the rim of his coffee cup.

"I have a personal question," he said at last, "if you don't mind."

He was probably going to ask what everyone wondered. Why? Why had she allowed a life of limitless promise to subside into dependency and, in short order, crime? Raven was too socially awkward to hesitate where courtesy kept others from going, and she felt the familiar iron hand of resentment. Why didn't people understand that it was unfathomable to her? Could anyone who was not, even now, such a thorough-going mystery to herself ever have fallen so low? But Raven's concerns were more pedestrian.

"I keep wondering why you came back here. I mean, you're like me, right? Single? No kids?"

Were he uncaged, Raven apparently would have flown away. Yet she felt an impulsive reluctance to compare herself to Arthur. She had been alone, but by choice, and always took it as a temporary condition. She'd been thirty-nine years old the night the federal agents arrived at her door, but a marriage, a family, remained solid figures in the portrait she'd drawn of her future.

"My mother was dying. And the Bureau of Prisons was willing to give me credit for helping take care of her. It was the Bureau's choice, frankly." Like other answers she'd offered Raven, this one, too, was comfortably incomplete. She'd left prison broke"the government and her lawyers had taken everything. And Duffy Muldawer, her 'sponsor' in the parlance of twelve-step programs, had been willing to offer her a place to stay. Even at that, she sometimes shared Raven's puzzlement about why she'd returned to what was, in all senses, the scene of the crime. "Once my community release time is over, I'll probably ask to move."

"She's gone? Your mother?"

"Four months ago."

"I'm sorry."

Gillian shrugged. She had not yet sorted out how she felt about the death of either of her parents"although it had long seemed one of her few strengths that she did not dwell on this sort of thing. She had had a home and a childhood that were worse than many, better than some. There were six kids and two alcoholic parents and a continuing state of rivalry and warfare among all of them. To Gillian, the whole significance of her upbringing was that it had inspired her to go on. It was like coming from Pompeii"the smoldering ruins and poisoned atmosphere could only be fled. Civilization would have to be reinvented elsewhere. She had put her entire faith in two things: intelligence and beauty. She was beautiful and she was smart, and with such a.s.sets she had seen no reason to be dragged down by what was behind her. The Jill Sullivan born in that house emerged as the Gillian she had willed into existence. And then destroyed.

"My father died three months ago and I'm still a wreck," Arthur said. His short brow was briefly molded by pain. "He never stopped making me crazy. He was probably the most nervous human being ever to walk the earth. Anxiety should have killed him years ago. But, you know, all that hovering and clucking"I always felt how much he cared." Raven's eyes, stilled by recollection, rose to her, confessing in a darkly plaintive look how rare such persons were in his life. Arthur was like some puppy always sticking his wet nose in your hand. In an instant, even he appeared embarra.s.sed, either by how much he'd revealed or by her evident discomfort. "Why am I telling you this?" he asked.

"Probably because you think someone like me has nothing better to do," she answered.

Her tone was purely conversational, and she thought at first the words must have meant something other than what they seemed to. But they didn't. For a moment the pure brutality of the remark seemed to stun them both. A quiver pa.s.sed through Raven's doughy face, then he straightened and closed one b.u.t.ton on his coat.

"I'm sorry to have bothered you. I made the mistake of thinking we had something in common."

Intent on collecting herself, Gillian found her cigarette pack in its leather case in her purse and lit up again. But her hand shook as she struck the match. Surrendering to shame was such a danger for her. Once it began, she could never climb out from under the mountainous debris. She watched the flame crawl ahead, rendering the gray fiber to cinder. Across the table, she could hear the zipper on Raven's briefcase.

"I may have to subpoena you for deposition," he said.

Touche, she thought. And tear her apart, of course, once he got the opportunity. Deservedly, too.

"Will you accept service by mail?" He asked how to reach her without going through the federal court probation office, and she told him she was living in the bas.e.m.e.nt apartment in Duffy Muldawer's house. Duffy, a former Roman Catholic priest, had been the Chief State Defender in Gillian's courtroom years ago and, as a result, Raven's constant opponent. Yet Arthur did not so much as bother with polite inquiries about Duffy's well-being. Instead, without looking her way, Raven aridly took down Duffy's address in an electronic organizer, one of a million marvels, each smaller than the next, that had become indispensable to Americans in the four and a half years she'd been away. The blue threads of smoke languished between them and a server briefly intervened to ask if either cared for more coffee. Gillian waited for her to go.

"I had no reason to be rude to you, Arthur."

"That's all right, Gillian. I know you always thought I was boring."

She smiled bitterly. But she felt some admiration for Arthur. He'd grown up. He could dish it out now. And he was on the mark. Nonetheless, she tried again.

"I'm not very happy, Arthur. And I suppose it makes me unhappier to see the people I used to know. It's a painful reminder."

That was stupid, of course. Who, after all, was happy? Not Arthur Raven, ungainly, uncomely, alone but for his family trouble, which she now remembered was a sister with mental problems. And no one was concerned with Gillian's emotional state anyway. Not that they doubted she was suffering. But they believed she deserved it.

Without response, Raven rose, stating simply that he would be in touch, and proceeded toward the door. Watching him exit, she caught sight of her reflection in the cheap mirrors, veined in gold, which boxed the posts supporting the restaurant ceiling. She was often startled to see herself, because, generally speaking, she looked so much better than she felt. There was something telling, she realized, about the fact that, like stainless steel, she appeared unharmed by the battering. But she was tall with strong posture, and even time didn't take its toll on good cheekbones. She was losing color by now. Her strawberry-blond hair was a rodent shade, on its way to gray; and, as she'd long found true of fair-skinned persons, she was showing every line, like porcelain. But the fas.h.i.+onable details"a fitted twill suit, a strand of pearls, a hacked-down hairdo spiked with mousse"supported the composed bearing that seemed to radiate from her. It was a look she'd a.s.sumed in her teens, as false as the self-portrayal manufactured by most adolescents, but it had never been forsaken, neither the appearance of outward command nor the sense of wanton fraud that went with it.

Certainly, she'd deceived Arthur Raven. She had answered misleadingly, then lashed him, to ensure he didn't linger to learn the truth. Raven had been led astray by rumor, the vicious talk about her that had circulated years ago when her life collapsed. They said she was a lush"but that wasn't so. They said she drank herself silly at lunch and came on the bench half crocked in the afternoon. It was true she'd fallen asleep up there, not just a momentary drowse, but laid her face down on the bench and was so far gone that after the bailiff woke her, she could see the ribbing of her leather blotter impressed on her cheek, when she looked in a mirror. They made fun of her inebriate mumbling and the ugly name-calling that escaped from her. They lamented the squandered brilliance that had put her on the bench at the age of thirty-two, only to drink away the gifts that had led to a Harvard Law School degree. They clucked about her failure to heed the warnings she'd been given repeatedly to sober up. And all the time she kept her secret. Gillian Sullivan was not a drunk, as legend had it, or even a pill popper, which was the suspicion of the court staffers who insisted that they never smelled liquor on her breath. No, Gillian Sullivan, former Deputy Prosecuting Attorney and then Judge of the Superior Court, was a smackhead, a stone doper, a heroin addict.

She did not shoot"she never shot up. As someone who treasured her appearance, even in her most desperate state, she would not deface herself. Instead she smoked heroin"chased the dragon, in the lingo. Tooted. With a pipe, a tube of aluminum foil, she sucked up the fumes as the powder in the heat turned first to brown goo, then pungent delirium. It was slower, minutes rather than seconds until the fabulous flush of pleasure began to take over, but she had been deliberate in everything throughout her life, and this, a sort of executive addiction, fit her image of herself, neater and less detectable"no pox of track marks, none of the telltale nosebleeds from snorting.

It had started with a guy. Isn't that how it always starts? Toby Elias was a gallant, handsome, twisted creature, an a.s.sistant in the Attorney General's Office, whom Gillian had some thought of marrying. One night he'd returned home with a hit of heroin lifted from a case he tried. It was 'the taste' one doper had offered another as the prelude to a sale, introduced in evidence, and never returned after the verdict. 'Why not?' he asked. Toby always managed to make perversity stylish. His ironic unwillingness to follow the rules meant for everyone else had beguiled her. They chipped"snorted"the first night, and reduced the quant.i.ty each night thereafter. It was an unearthly peace, but nothing that required repet.i.tion.

A month later, Toby stepped in front of an 18-wheeler. She never knew if it was an accident. He was not killed. He was a body in a bed for months, and then a dripping wreck in a wheelchair. And she had deserted him. She wasn't married to the man. She couldn't give him her life when he hadn't promised his.

Yet it was a sad turning point, she knew that now. Toby had never recovered and neither had she. Three or four months after that, she'd pinched a taste on her own for the first time. During a trial in front of her, she allowed the defense chemist to open the sealed evidence bag to weigh how much heroin had been seized. The rush seemed more delicious now. She forged opportunities, ordered tests performed when none had been requested, encouraged the prosecutors to lock their exhibits in her chambers overnight rather than tote them back to the P.A.'s Office. Eventually, the tampering was discovered, but a courtroom deputy was suspected and banished to an outlying precinct. After that, she had to score on the street. And she needed money.

By then she was taken for a drunk. As a warning, she'd been transferred from the Felony Trial Division to Common Pleas, tort court, where she heard personal-injury cases. There somebody knew. One of those dopers she'd sentenced had recognized her, a pretty white lady lurking in the bombed-looking blocks less than a mile from the courthouse. He'd told the cop he snitched to. From there, word traveled to the Presiding Judge in Common Pleas, a villain named Brendan Tuohey, and his henchman, Rollo Kosic. Kosic visited her with the news, but offered no corrective. Just money. Take his advice from time to time about the outcome in a case. There would be money.

And she complied, always with regrets, but life by now was the misery between hits. One night there was a knock, a scene out of 1984 or Darkness at Noon. The U.S. Attorney and FBI agents were on her doorstep. She'd been nailed, for bribery, not narcotics. She cried and blabbed and tooted as soon as they were gone.

After that night, she'd turned to Duffy, her current landlord, a recovering alcoholic with long experience as a counselor from his days as a priest. She was sober when she was sentenced, her habit the only secret that survived a period in which she otherwise felt she'd been stripped naked and marched in chains down Marshall Avenue. She was not about to revive all of that now, surely not for Arthur Raven or for a murderer who had been beast enough to rape the dead.

Yet the sudden viciousness that had escaped her with Arthur had shaken her, like finding a fissure in the ground under your feet. Seeking to spare herself further shame, she had, instead, compounded it. For hours, she would be dwelling on Raven and the way his mouth had softened to an incredulous little 'o' in the wake of her remark. She would need Duffy tonight, his quiet counsel, to keep her from drowning.

With that much clear, she stood from the small table and caught sight again of herself. To the eye, there was a lean, elegant woman, appointed with care. But within was her truest enemy, a demon self, who, even after imprisonment and disgrace, remained unsatisfied and uncurbed, and, except for its will to see her suffer, unknown.

Chapter 4.

July 5, 1991 The Prosecutor A WAIL, sudden enough to stop Muriel's heart, broke out from the booth across from her as she sat at the soda-fountain counter. A black man in a full-length ap.r.o.n, probably the cook, had slid to his feet and the prospect of his departure seemed to have freshened the anguish of the woman there. Dark and thin, she was melted against him. The younger man, with a glimmering stud in his ear, lingered behind the two haplessly.

"The widow," whispered one of the techs, dusting the front case under the register. "She won't go home."

The cook eased her over to the young fellow, who reluctantly raised an arm to her shoulder, while Mrs. Leonidis carried on fiercely. In one of those moments of cold-blooded clarity for which Muriel was already noted in the P.A.'s Office, she suddenly recognized that Gus's widow was going through the standard gestures of grief as she understood them. The crying, the shrieking was her duty. A more genuine reaction to her husband's death, true mourning, or even relief, would come long from now in private.

Since the day she'd started as a prosecutor, Muriel had had an instinct for the survivors of violence. She was not sure how connected she'd been to her parents, or whether any man, including her dead husband, had ever mattered to the quick. But she cared for these victims with the radiant nuclear fury of the sun. It had not taken her long to see that their suffering arose not merely from their loss but also from its imponderable nature. Their pain was not due to some fateful calamity like a typhoon, or an enemy as fickle and unreasoning as disease, but to a human failure, to the demented will of an a.s.sailant and the failure of the regime of reason and rules to contain him. The victims were especially ent.i.tled to think this should never have happened"because, according to the law, it shouldn't have.

When Mrs. Leonidis was again under some control, she marched past Muriel to the Ladies'. The young man, who had escorted her halfway, cast Muriel a sheepish look as the restroom door closed.

"I can't talk to her," he explained. "My sisters are on the way from out of town. They'll get her out of here. n.o.body listens to me." Soft-looking and skittish, the young man was balding early and his hair was cropped as closely as an army recruit's. Up close, Muriel could see that his eyes and nose were raw. She asked if he too was related to Gus.

"The son," he said, with gloomy emphasis. "The Greek son." He found some bitter humor in what he had said. He introduced himself as John Leonidis and offered a clammy hand. When Muriel had responded with her name and job t.i.tle, John suddenly brightened.

"Thank G.o.d," he said. "That's what my ma is waiting for, to talk to the prosecutor." He slapped at his pockets until he realized he was already holding a pack of Kools. "Can I ask you something?" He took a seat on the stool beside her. "Am I a suspect?"

"A suspect?"

"I don't know, there's all kinds of stuff in my head. The only person I can think of who'd want to kill Gus is me."

"Did you?" Muriel asked, conversationally.

John Leonidis fixed on the glowing end of his cigarette. His nails had been nibbled to ragged slivers.

"I'd never have had the b.a.l.l.s," he said. "But you know, all this 'good' stuff. It was P.R. At home, he was a pig. Like he made my mother cut his toenails? Can you imagine? In the summer, he'd sit like a sultan on the back porch in the sun while she did it. I mean, it could make you vomit."

John gave his head a bitter toss, and then, with little warning, he began to cry. Muriel had been out of sorts with her own father before he died two years ago, and she had an instant appreciation of the tornado of confusion buffeting John. Tom Wynn had been President of the UAW local at the Ford plant outside Fort Hill, and a field rep, a man who spoke brotherhood in the plant and bile at home. Following his death, after top brief an interval, Muriel's mother had married the princ.i.p.al of the school where she taught, but she was happier in love now than Muriel had ever been. Like John, Muriel had been left to labor with the stillborn emotions that accompanied everything unfinished with her father. As John struggled for his composure, pinching the bridge of his nose, Muriel laid her hand over his on the marked Formica of the counter.

By the time John's mother emerged from the rest room, he had gathered himself. As he had predicted, when he introduced Muriel as "the prosecutor," Athena Leonidis, who only a moment before had been wilted by grief, stiffened to deliver her message.

"They should be dead, I want them dead," she said, "the filth who did this my Gus. Dead. With my own eyes. I will not sleep till I see." She dissolved again and fell upon her son, who, over his mother's shoulder, cast Muriel another bleak look.

But she understood Mrs. Leonidis. Muriel, too, believed in punishment. Her mother, the teacher, was the touchy-feely type, turn the other cheek, but Muriel had always agreed with her father, who defended some of the bare-knuckles maneuvers of life in the union by saying that humans were not going to be good on their own, they needed some encouragement. In an ideal world, you'd give everybody who lived right a medal. Yet there was neither tin nor time enough to do that in this life. Thus, another kind of object lesson was required"so that the good got something for their efforts. Pain had to be wrought upon the body of the bad. Not because there was any special delight in their suffering. But because there was pain in goodness"the pangs of denial, the blistering under the hand of restraint. The good deserved an even trade. Murder required death. It was part of the fundamental reciprocity that was the law.

The Detective Commander, Harold Greer, appeared.

He encouraged Mrs. Leonidis to go home, but it was Muriel he wanted. Greer introduced himself back in Gus's small office.

"I've been waiting for somebody from the P.A.'s Office for two hours. Tommy Molto's nowhere to be found." Molto, the head of Homicide, had recently regained his job in a civil suit, after being fired for supposedly framing a defendant. No one yet knew quite what to make of Tommy. "Larry says you're smart."

Muriel hitched a shoulder. "Consider the source."

Sober by nature, Greer nonetheless managed a spirited laugh. Larry probably never had a boss he didn't turn into a rival.

"Well, if you're smart enough to get a search warrant on a holiday weekend, you're smart enough for me," said Greer.